stevepierce

“What I’ve tried to do is explain there is no magic bullet,” Koryzno said. Communities are faced with either making budget cuts or raising revenues to keep their financial situations sound.”

Actually there are third and fourth and fifth options (and really many more) and I surprised I have to say this,

#3 Figure out how to provide the same service cheaper.

#4 Determine if the service is not a core service or can better be done by someone else and eliminate or partner with someone else.

For example, does the City manager need a take home car. Have them drive to work, pickup a car like every other employee and return it at the end of the day. Oh I know you can give all sorts of reasons why it is NICE to have, but it isn’t an essential service and all the other employees in the organization already have to do this.

Or another example: do you really need a forestry division. Could this be done by the County or State or University. Do you need planners working on global climate change initiatives. Fun stuff to work on but is that a core service?

#5 Regional cooperation to provide shared services. For example in Ypsilanti, they should partner with nearby communities. One could providing building and plan review for both communities while the other provides parking services and rental inspections and bot realize savings and better service.

If the only two options you see are to cut spending and increase taxes, it is really hard to find and adopt other effective strategies.

In Ypsilanti, this new City Income Tax combined with a debt reduction millage plus other millage increases results in a 30% or more tax increase for residents.

Find out for yourself, use this Tax Calculator or http://bit.ly/tax-calc to see the impact off these taxes on residents or to find what you would pay if you lived in Ypsi.

I remember the story the Ann Arbor News wrote about me saying I had defrauded people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and I was the subject of a Federal investigation by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. The News included a color picture of me and named my company while saying I was accused of Fraud.

Turns out they had the wrong Steve Pierce.

I am Steven Robert. Pierce in Ypsilanti, the press release from the CFTC Identified Stephen Alan Pierce in Ann Arbor. He is black, tall, bald, very good looking, and a financial investing author. I am not any of these.

According to the Police Chief and the Ypsi HR department, Ypsilanti never had 54 cops, they had a budget for 54 for just one year in the 90's, but never got close to that number.

For one year, Ypsi had 51 officers. Historically over the last 40 years the number runs from the mid 30's to the mid 40's.

The reason for the budget of 54 cops and the one unusual year with 51 was due to all of the money from President Clinton's 100,000 new cops grant program back in the 90's. Once that grant money dried up after three years, the force dropped back to the low 40's.

Crime is down significantly over the last 15 years and Ypsi has 50% fewer residents than we did in 70's. Also according to researchers, call volume for most departments is not up. Because of computers and electronic dispatch, the police do a better job of tracking calls and write more reports, but calls for service and the number of contacts per day per officer is about the same as it was 10 years ago as it was 20 years ago.

When talking about cops in the City, some forget to include EMU. Well that isn't quite true, they want to count EMU's students in our population stats but seem to forget to count EMU officers in the officer count for the city.

Add in the EMU cops and the fact that population stats for Ypsilanti already count students which aren't here right now, and YPD has 35 officers plus dispatchers. EMU has an additional 25 officers and 6 dispatchers according to their website. That is 60 total officers working inside our city limits.

Another myth is our population doubles to 50,000 every day. Again not true. You can't take Ypsi total population and EMU total enrollment and combine that and say that is how many people are in Ypsi every day.

But our former Police Chief would always complain he had a city of 50,000 to patrol but only a third of the money.

Again this is not true.

According to a study done by the City of Ypsilanti, 10,000 residents leave Ypsilanti each day to go to work and school and about 10,000 come to Ypsi each day. It is a wash.

According to EMU stats there are about 2,000 to 2,500 visitors, students and staff on campus at any one point in time. Not 25,000 as our former Chief would claim.

Also students, including those in the dorms, are already counted in Ypsilanti's total population stats. You can't count them twice. Moreover, most of the students leave during the summer. So during our busiest period we actually have fewer people living in the city.

Truth is, we have about 18,000 year round residents here in Ypsilanti and at its peak during the day, we have about 25,000 residents, students and visitors here in the city. Not 50,000.

Remember, Ann Arbor's population swells during the day as well to nearly double the actual number of residents.

Which is why departments look at total residents, not residents plus visitors to benchmark department size.

So for 18,000 year round residents and 21,000 total residents, we have 35 YPD cops and 25 EMU cops working annually in the city.

According to the FBI for a city our size, the average number of cops per 1,000 is 1.9. If you look at just the midwest, the number drops to 1.8.

Ypsilanti/EMU has 2.85 officers per 1,000 residents. That is 50% more cops than the typical city our size in the country.

If you don't count EMU cops, the number of cops per 1,000 is 1.66. Remove students from total population (assuming EMU cops provide service for the students) and the number increases to 1.94 YPD officers per 1,000 full time residents.

While you make many interesting points, you don't have your facts correct on AATA.

The current budget for AATA is $158,000. AATA is asking for a nearly $100,000 increase for next year.

Given that EMU and the 33 circulator costs about $120,000 a year, I suspect your idea for an Ypsi Circulator would be about the same cost of what Ypsi is paying right now.

I hope you can talk more about a circulator, it is an interesting idea in that we can show exactly what city money is going towards Ypsi bus service instead of the very nebulous commuter runs heading to Ann Arbor and elsewhere.

But I disagree with you that an Ypsi Circulator will save any money. It won't.

However, just because a good idea won't save money, if it will improve service and make our city tax dollars go farther, by all means lets consider it.

Some of your other ideas are pretty good and I hope the Mayor and City Council will consider these and others in the coming two years.

If you want to host a Wireless Ypsi node in your neighborhood or business, you can do it two ways.

If you are already near an existing connection, get a $50 radio to help expand the network. It is $100 for an outdoor and we can help you get it installed.

You can start a new network in your community by sharing your Internet connection. Sorry, AT&T and Comcast residential don't allow sharing. But most of the other DSL providers do and commercial ISP allow sharing.

We already have connections in Ypsi Township and Ann Arbor.

Head over to http://www.wireless.ypsi.com for more info or email us, noc@ypsi.com

Boy the Visteon/ACH building in Ypsilanti would be a perfect lcoation for a studeio.

A million SF of space, great offices for post production. Convenient freeway access, dock and warehouse space. Much of the manufacturing space could be easily made into sound stages and sets.

Lots of outdoor space which could be secured. 10 minutes from Willow Run airport and 15 minutes from Metro.

Has the mayor or Ypsi City or SPARK talked to the Michigan film office about Ypsi.

If not, why not?

We should have been up in Lansing last summer talking about this instead of just letting it pass us by. ACH has had the property on the market all fall and I think they are asking about $8 million. Given the current troubles at ACH/Visteon, a cash deal of $2 to 3 million could easily close the deal.

So if the change is simply in formula, what is the current graduation rate using the old method to calculate success?

Secondly, if the issue is it may take a year longer to graduate, since the state now keeps "great and easily trackable stats" it should be easy to report graduation rates at 5 years as Dr. Hawkins says would be more accurate for the district. So what is the 5-year number?

If neither alternative method shows a better rate, then the problem is likely not the new methodology implemented by the state.